PARIS (Reuters) – Ties between Vivendi and Italy’s Mediaset are not “broken” but nor are they essential to the French media group’s strategy as it could find other Italian partners, its chief executive told Les Echos newspaper.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Ride-hailing service Uber [UBER.UL] has decided to invest $500 million into an ambitious global mapping project to wean itself off dependence on Google Maps and pave the way for driverless cars, the Financial Times reported on Sund…

MILAN (Reuters) – With the ink barely dry on its bailout plan, Italian bank Monte dei Paschi di Siena faces a Herculean task convincing investors to back a third recapitalization in as many years and avert a banking crisis that would send shockwaves a…

FRANKFURT (Reuters) – The head of Volkswagen’s luxury unit Audi has been ordered to reimburse the car maker for the costs of a party that the car maker had initially paid for, a German weekly reported.

TOKYO (Reuters) – The Bank of Japan’s review of its monetary stimulus program promised for September has revived expectations it could adopt some form of “helicopter money”, printing money for government spending to spur inflation.

The campaign of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is the latest possible victim of a series of hack attacks some cybersecurity experts have linked to the Russian government. Campaign officials reportedly acknowledged that an analytics program it uses, which is maintained by the DNC, was accessed in a breach discovered earlier this month.

ANY big announcement about banks that is made after the markets close, and with a weekend to come before they reopen, brings back dark memories of the 2007-08 financial crisis. The results of the latest European bank stress test, which were released on Friday night, lacked the drama of that period and contained much that was reassuring. But they did not dispel the doubts that linger around a handful of institutions, notably in Italy.

Aggregate numbers suggested that European banks were in a generally healthier position than at the time of the last stress test, in autumn 2014. This time the banks started off with an average “fully-loaded” capital ratio of 12.6% and ended up with one of 9.2% in the tests’ most adverse scenario; that compares with a fall from 11.1% to 7.6% last time. No country’s banking sector ended these tests with an average capital ratio below the 5.2% of Ireland; in 2014, the capital ratio for several countries was negative, implying systemic insolvency. And all banks, except for Monte dei Paschi of Italy and Allied Irish, had capital ratios in the adverse scenario that exceeded 5.5%—a threshold that has previously been…Continue reading

THERE are only a handful of occasions on which it feels acceptable to have a drink before the sun has reached the yard-arm. Christmas, weddings and funerals, and the Test match are all fine. So too, for some reason, is an airport.I have never been enti…